Tinfoil + Raccoon: Interview with Jonathan Selwood (The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse)

I know. You are all in a deep funk over having to leave Hogwarts. Book 7 is out, you've already read it, and are trying to cope with the reality that it's all over. Let me recommend something to take you far away from witches, wizard and wands, to a wobbly world of weirdness. In The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse (Harper Perennial, 2007), Jonathan Selwood gives us a very funny, Vonnegut-flavored read that both embraces and mocks our culture's obsession with celebrity. First a brief review, followed by an interview with Selwood:

Isabel Raven, a young woman with incredible technical skill as a painter, suddenly finds herself as much a celebrity as the people whose faces she paints into reproductions of classic works of art (think Scarlett Johansson in Venus on the Half Shell, Macaulay Culkin as Blue Boy). Isabel moves around a Los Angeles that's cracking open, oozing tar and shimmying with the aftershocks of a major earthquake. While the "pinball theory" refers to a much-lauded, then deeply buried theory developed by her father, a retired physicist, about how the world will end in 2049, Isabel is a bit of a pinball herself. She bounces back and forth between her manager, a supercreep devotee of primal scream therapy, her celebrity chef boyfriend (who is shacking up with the Latina Britney Spears, one of Isabel's recent subjects), her dope-smoking hippie parents, and a Bill Gates-like neo-millionaire who hails Isabel as a PoMo hottie genius.

Despite the bizarre swirling drama and her resultant occassional freak-outs, Isabel wanders through it all with an underlying sense of ennui that says, "What are you gonna do?" Being a pop culture voyeur myself, I think Selwood captures the essence of our collective obsession perfectly. We are, at the same time, horrified and titillated by the freak show. We cluck and gasp and wag our fingers in judgment as we plunk down the dough for another ticket. We bitch about the cost of the lemonade and popcorn we just bought to munch on while watching what we fear (and hope) is the end of the world. If you're looking for a condemnation of Culture Lite, you'll find no such message here. Selwood drags us down into the tar and gets us to laugh at the mess we're in. What are you gonna do? (Interview follows)

Selwood contacted me on MySpace, one of, oh, say, a million new authors to do this in the past year or so. Usually, I add these folks as friends and don't give them a second look. But Selwood was one of only two or three authors who appeared to have actually read my profile, and gave me props for listing X, the quintessential LA punk band, as one of my musical favorites. I reciprocated by reading the blurbs about Pinball and wrote Selwood back to ask for a review copy and a possible interview, both of which he made happen. We conducted the interview via email in mid-July 2007.

RH: I've been trying to come up with a very concise introduction to the interview, but, holy cow, there's a ton going on in the book! It was sort of like stumbling drunk through a fun house--in a good way, I mean! In 25 words or less--tell me about your book!

JS: An artist suddenly hits on an idea that makes her the "It" girl of LA's art scene. Unfortunately, her world promptly goes to #$%#&$% hell.

RH: How has using MySpace as a marketing tool worked out for you? The reason I ask is that most of my friend requests are from authors or bands, and you are maybe one out of two or three authors who actually left a message that indicated you'd looked at my profile.

JS: I approach MySpace a little more deliberately than I think a lot of authors do. I generally don't add people who haven't even glanced at my page (e.g., crappy bands or fundamentalist Christian writers), and I really do try to look at the pages of people I send friend requests to. It's certainly more work, but it's allowed me to actually "meet" a large number of dark comedy readers and writers that I never would have met otherwise. As something of an offbeat writer (as you pointed out, my novel's like "stumbling drunk through a fun house"), it can be hard to get mainstream media attention. MySpace gives me a chance to bypass the media middlemen and connect with potential readers directly.

RH: I was also curious about MySpace because I know other authors who have gotten poor to no support from their publishers and are left to shill for themselves. I thought maybe you were one of those poor slobs, but when I got my readers' copy, I saw that you have amazing support for a first time author. Aside from having a very funny, kick -ass book, how did that happen?

JS: I've been remarkably fortunate in receiving excellent support from Harper Perennial right from the beginning. I did everything I could to match their enthusiasm--even going as far as to learn HTML so that I could personally design the numerous webpages which tie into the novel. I think many authors look at marketing and publicity as a necessary evil, but I've tried to look at it more as an artistic project in and of itself. Drafting the copy for the satirical tie-in site www.selwoodinstitute.com (which Harper also printed as a tri-fold brochure) was about as much fun as I've ever had writing. I like to think that all my own marketing efforts encouraged Harper to support me all the more, but as I said, they were great from the start.

RH: Los Angeles is really a prominent a character in the book, and not a particularly likable one at that, with tar bubbling up everywhere and such a sense of ...instability. You also start the book by having Isabel hear "Los Angeles" by X on the radio, which is about leaving a place that's clearly awful to be, but leaving it with regret. Your bio says you grew up in Hollywood, and now you're in Portland, OR. I was looking for traces of fond homage in your characterization of LA, and was hard pressed to find any. What's your relationship with this city that you seem to know intimately, but have dumped?

JS: No "fond homage?" Really?

I do love Los Angeles. I visit several times a year and always feel the pull to move back. Certainly I felt alienated growing up in the rather bizarre culture of Hollywood, but then I also felt alienated living in New York City, and even here in Portland.

As for the "instability" of Los Angeles, I'd say my feeling is more love/hate. On the one hand it's arguably the most artistically productive city in the world--entertaining literally billions with TV and movies--and I think that the constant chaotic flux somehow facilitates that. On the other hand, I feel like the city I grew up in has simply been carpet bombed. New Yorkers are terribly nostalgic for the past (even the mess that was the '70s), but Los Angeles is always focused on the present.

RH: Since I'm not imaginative enough to write anything that's not boiled over from my own experiences, I always get this voyeuristic interest in the experiences of fiction writers I'm reading. I also just read that it's really tacky to ask a fiction writer if they've had the experiences that their characters have. So, I'm not going to be super nosy with you and ask if you've actually had vaginal rejuvenation surgery. But, one of the amazing things about the book is that you are writing from a young woman's viewpoint. True, she's not exactly a sugar-and-spice chick, but what made you decide to use a female narrator? Was it harder or easier than you imagined?

JS: At the time I started writing the novel, just about all the artists I knew personally were women. It seemed completely normal for me to tell the story from the point of view of a female protagonist. Actually, it was only after I'd finished the first draft that a friend (who had yet to read any of it) asked if I was worried that I might not be able to pull it off. Of course, by then, it was too late.

I should add, though, that all of my current draft readers (i.e., the friends who read and critique my stuff first) are women, as is my editor. I'm hoping they caught any truly egregious gender errors.

RH: What's it like at this stage in the first novel process with at least two good reviews (Booklist and Publisher's Weekly)? We're talking just a couple weeks before the books hits the street--anything for you to do besides wait? Any concern about losing some thunder to the Boy Wizard?

JS: Actually, things seem quite busy. These days the Internet provides a seemingly unlimited way to try to drum up attention--whether it's making friends on MySpace, writing articles for various websites, guest blogging, or, of course, answering interview questions!

And I've got no problem with the final Boy Wizard installment. Just as long as my novel outsells it.